Some of these monsters are EXTREMELY dangerous! The mummy rot is nasty! Mummies are only a CR3 creature, but a cleric needs to be 5th level to get Remove Curse. A party better know ahead of time what they are up against, or they will be sorely pressed not to have some players permanently killed, especially if they are days away from higher level Cleric NPCs.
Nice!
I, for one, appreciate a fairly lethal game.
It seems that you share my enthusiasm.
Well there's one odd retcon in there. Rakshasa are now specifically linked to and originate in the 9 Hells, rather than previously an implied link to Acheron. That seems an unnecessary change.
Nope, because the book actually states that, unless specified otherwise, summoned monsters are worth full XP. So the encounter gets tougher, but the summoning demon itself doesn't.
Well there's one odd retcon in there. Rakshasa are now specifically linked to and originate in the 9 Hells, rather than previously an implied link to Acheron. That seems an unnecessary change.
As [MENTION=30022]Lancelot[/MENTION] noted, this is a return to 1st ed AD&D lore. The table that [MENTION=30022]Lancelot[/MENTION] refers to is found in MM2 (under the Devil entry). And in Dragon 75, Ed Greenwood's discussion of the 2nd Hell (Dis) refers to the role of rakshasas on that plane.See, that is exactly the kind of stuff I don't get. Why would they do that? Who stands to gain from this change?